Federal Lawyer Crows After Imposing $22.5 Million Government Fine on Company by the commission which has been cracking down on tech companies for privacy violations and is also investigating Google for antitrust violations the Times reports But in fact imagination isn t necessary The lawyer Megan Gray who just started working for the FTC was so pleased to beat back Google that she sent an email to friends and colleagues to brag about her performance I m pleased to report that my new gig at the FTC has started with a bang writes Gray This is also my roundabout way of letting folks know of my new position since I did not previously have a chance to tell many people suffice to say I ve had my nose to the grindstone since I started five months ago Upon my arrival I was made first chair trial counsel in the case against Google for privacy violations under the comprehensive Consent Order that became effective last year With a fantastic team working with me we were able to obtain a 22 500 000 million settlement the FTC s largest ever we officially announced the case and settlement today I will be continuing as lead enforcer on the Consent Order but hopefully I will

NYPD unveils new $40 million super computer system that uses data from network of cameras, license plate readers and crime reports are in the next century We are leading the pack The system which cost somewhere between 30 and 40 million to develop could also help pay for itself with the city expecting to earn 30 of the profits on Microsoft sales to other city s and countries Bloomberg said The joint venture began when the NYPD approached Microsoft about the effort officials said Cops were involved with the programmers throughout the process earning the city its cut of the proceeds Officials declined to predict how much the city s share of the system could be worth For years we ve been stovepiped as far as databases are concerned NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Now everything that we have about an incident an event an individual comes together on that workbench so it s one stop shopping for investigators Using the new system investigators will be able to access information through live video feeds and could potentially see who left a suspicious package behind just moments later Kelly said The system will also allow cops to get a reading on radioactive substances and determine if it is naturally occurring some kind of weapon or a harmless isotope used in medical treatments

Olympics spectator with Parkinson's wants 'exoneration' after arrest Worsfold whose experience was first reported by Private Eye claims police questioned him about his demeanour and why he had not been seen to be visibly enjoying the event Worsfold who was diagnosed with Parkinson s in 2010 suffers from muscle rigidity that affects his face He was released after two hours without charge or caution It could have been done better I was arrested for not smiling I have Parkinson s he said adding that he realised the officers were working long hours and trying to control the event properly but they had not in his case acted correctly He said he did not want to make further comment until he received a response from Surrey police Worsfold who teaches martial arts in Leatherhead climbed Mount Kilimanjaro last February for the Save the Rhino charity Surrey police said There were a number of factors which led officers to make this arrest including the fact that the race was rapidly approaching the heightened level of security due to the high profile nature of the event and the sheer number of spectators in attendance These were fully explained to the individual concerned He was given words of advice and released with no further action They added that Worsfold had had a number of knives in his possession but that these turned out to be made of rubber and for use only as display items The statement said Surrey police has received a letter from the man in which he has said that he fully understands and appreciates the action taken by officers He has also said that he appreciated and thanked both the arresting officers for their apologies and explanations following his release Chief Superintendent Gavin Stephens said Officers were policing huge numbers of people during the Olympic events and in

Amount of CO2 being sucked away by Earth 'has doubled in 50 years' of the investigating scientists were based Earth is taking up twice as much CO2 today as it was 50 years ago says Colorado postdoc Ashley Ballantyne lead author of the new paper in tinned quotes issued by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA whose boffins were also involved in the research According to the NOAA This new global analysis makes it clear that scientists do not yet understand well enough the processes by which ecosystems of the world are removing CO2 from the atmosphere or the relative importance of possible sinks regrowing forests on different continents for example or changing absorption of carbon dioxide by various ocean regions We don t know why or where this process is happening commented NOAA boffin Pieter Tans We need to identify what s going on here so that we can improve our projections of future CO2 levels and how climate change will progress in the future According to the Colorado uni announcement Recent studies by others have suggested carbon sinks were declining in some areas of the globe including parts of the Southern Hemisphere and portions of the world s oceans But the new Nature study showed global CO2 uptake by

UK police arrest man over Twitter insult Daley s father died of brain cancer a year ago and the 18 year old Olympian had hoped win a medal for myself and my dad But he finished fourth on Monday in the 10 meter synchronized platform with teammate Pete Waterfield Afterward a Twitter user sent him several negative messages including You let your dad down i hope you know that Dorset Police said early Tuesday that a 17

Social sickness: How Twitter can tell you (up to eight days in advance) when you are going to get ill New York using a heatmap of users who complain of being ill Adam Sadilek at the University of Rochester and his team analyzed 4 4 million GPS tagged Tweets from over 600 000 users in New York City over the course of one month in 2010 They trained their artificial intelligence algorithm to ignore tweets by healthy people such as those claiming they were sick of a particular song and trained it to find those who were really ill Sadilek says the key to his system is friendships Given that three of your friends have flu like symptoms and that you have recently met eight people possibly strangers who complained about having runny noses and headaches what is the probability that you will soon become ill as well he said Our models enable you to see the spread of infectious diseases such as flu throughout a real life population observed through online social media The tweets were plotted on a map and used to predict when a particular users was at high risk of getting ill We apply machine learning and natural language understanding techniques to determine the health state of Twitter users at any given time Mr Sadilek said Since a large fraction of tweets is geo tagged we can plot them on a map and observe how sick and healthy people interact Our model then predicts if and when an individual will fall ill with high accuracy thereby improving our understanding of the emergence of global epidemics from people s day to day interactions The heatmaps show a city going through a flu epidemic The more red an area is the more people are afflicted by flu at that location We show emergent aggregate patterns in real time with second by second resolution boasted Sadilek By contrast previous

US officers tell Congress that general blocked probe of hospital in Kabul all He went on The general did not want bad news to leave his command before the election or after the election At the hearing officers described the extent of human suffering at the hospital where the lack of care forced families of soldiers to empty vats of blood draining from their wounds When asked to describe the scene at the hospital Fassl said it lacked basic facilities Hygiene was poor and the hospital lacked soap heat and the means to boil water he said There were open vats of blood draining out of soldiers wounds there was faeces on the floor There were many family members taking care of their loved ones The family members were emptying these vats of blood to help their patients out Last year the Wall Street Journal reported that Afghan soldiers often died from neglect or lack of food as some Afghan doctors and nurses demanded bribes for food Fassl said he had expected Caldwell to insist on going to the hospital to find out what was going on Fassl said When I think about what we were trying to do in Afghanistan which is build the army and police corps how could we allow this type of suffering to go on when we should be showing the Afghan citizens that their soldiers matter Caldwell is now head of the US army north command and senior commander of Fort Sam Houston in Texas Colonel Wayne Shanks spokeman for the command said I am sure that Lieutenant General Caldwell would welcome the opportunity to respond to any inquiry and I m confident that once the facts are presented and examined all allegations will be proven false A dog and pony show At the hearing the military officers spoke of the lack of discipline and rule

Rainwater collection case leads to jail sentence, fine his sentence Harrington said he stores the water mainly for fire protection and has pledged to appeal his convictions Thirty days in jail for catching rainwater Harrington said Wednesday to the Mail Tribune We live in an extreme wildfire area and here the government is going to open the valves and really waste all the water right now at the start of peak fire season Harrington said At the center of the case was a 1925 state law giving the water commission exclusive rights to all the water in Big Butte Creek its tributaries and Big Butte Springs the core of the city s municipal water supply In court filings Harrington had argued that he s not diverting water from the creek system merely capturing rainwater and snowmelt from his 172 acres along Crowfoot Road Harrington has maintained that this runoff called diffused water does not fall under the state water resources jurisdiction and does not violate the 1925 act In the past water managers have concluded that the runoff is a tributary of nearby Crowfoot Creek and thus subject to the law A six person jury earlier this month sided with the state on nine misdemeanor charges They were